Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:37:55 -0500 From: "Ben Kaduk" <minimarmot@gmail.com> To: "Tom Rhodes" <trhodes@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Old style quotation [Was:Re: cvs commit: www/en/platforms amd64.sgml] Message-ID: <47d0403c0712181537o4e215c9agb916bd5fe88f6f44@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20071212013750.034d685b.trhodes@FreeBSD.org> References: <200712081213.lB8CDQAB044237@repoman.freebsd.org> <475A94B4.4060606@FreeBSD.org> <20071212013750.034d685b.trhodes@FreeBSD.org>
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On 12/12/07, Tom Rhodes <trhodes@freebsd.org> wrote: > On Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:57:24 +0100 > Gabor Kovesdan <gabor@freebsd.org> wrote: > > > Chin-San Huang escribi=F3: > > > chinsan 2007-12-08 12:13:26 UTC > > > > > > FreeBSD doc repository > > > > > > Modified files: > > > en/platforms amd64.sgml > > > Log: > > > - Revert the correct American English style. > > > ( ``Hammer''. -> ``Hammer.'' ) > > > > > This change made me remember of a thing that I've wanted to discuss. As > > a tradition, we use `` and '' character pairs to quote text. This seems > > to be strange for people that don't know this tradition and there's no > > technical reason to go on doing this, we can just use " ", which seems > > to be better formatted according to the current style conventions used > > on the web. Is there any objection against that I change them to normal > > quotation marks? We already use those in the Hungarian and Spanish web > > translations without any problems and the text in the <quote> element i= n > > DocBook also have normal quotation marks in the generated output. > > I asked this very question a long time ago, something with layout > in the ISO key set (I think). You can search the archives, it was > about or around 5 years ago (again, I think). > I saw this fairly recently elsewhere -- apparently it is in some *roff spec that `` and '' should always render as nice, paired quotes. This didn't actually happen for a long time since that's basically the best that ASCII can do; however, Unicode makes it possible. Just using " would, by that spec, produce broken output. It is, however, questionable if this is relevant anymore. -Ben Kaduk
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